Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category

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Instagram’s Big Mistake

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

If you have logged onto the internet in the last few days, are an avid smart phone user, or have watched the news lately, than chances are that you have caught wind of the uproar following Instagram’s release of its new terms of service. The following sentence, found in the new terms of service, caused an enormous backlash:

You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you.


 Almost immediately after Instagram released the brief paragraph outlining the new terms of service that will go into effect on January 16, 2013, the internet exploded with a plethora of people threatening to delete their accounts and speaking harshly on the negative effects of these changes. Among those threatening to delete their accounts were highly prominent celebrities such as Anderson Cooper, Jonah Hill, Kim Kardashian, and Lauren Conrad who all took their frustration out about the policy on Twitter.  The photo app that everyone loved for its beautiful filters has quickly turned into the target of a huge amount of criticism and distaste.

Since the initial release of the new terms of service, Instagram quickly realized its mistake and has had three official press releases about how “they are listening” and vaguely alluded to changing the terms to better meet people’s requests. The changes were apparently not drastic enough and an Instagram user has filed a potential class-action lawsuit against the company for announcing the new terms of service.The San Diego-based law firm Finklestein & Krinsk filed its complaint in a San Francisco federal court.  Lucy Funes,  who is the person responsible for taking her complaint to federal court in San Francisco, has  stated that Instagram is, “taking its customer’s property rights” with the new terms to be put in place. A Facebook spokesperson (Facebook has recently acquired Instagram) said that the lawsuit is without merit and that the company intends to fight the claim vigorously.

Instagram’s new terms of service will officially go into effect on January 16,2013. Time will tell how many more changes the terms will go through.

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Flock

Thursday, November 22nd, 2012

While mobile and smart phone proliferation continues to make it easier to capture the memories we make with our friends and family, capture copies of documents, and even facilitates sharing them on social networks, they don’t help make it easier to upload those shared photos—at least they didn’t until now. The makers of the Bump app recently launched Flock, a passive photo sharing app that aims to change the way we upload and share photo albums with the people in the photos all while changing the way we interact with other apps. Things have come a long way from the days of uploading photos captured with digital scanning and emailing them to your grandmother.



The idea behind flock is that it should be easy for everyone in a photo to be invited to see those photos by accessing cloud-based photo albums—and it should all happen automatically. Most smart phones, like the iPhone, already automatically geo-tag photos and Facebook face recognition software can automatically tag photos. Using these two functionalities, the Flock app automatically identifies photos on your phone that contain Facebook friends, prompts you to share them, and then invites those friends to view a group album shared on the cloud.

There’s a lot to parse with this app, but the most important aspects are what it means for photo sharing and what it means for app use. Since this is photography, digital scanning, and digital photo blog, the fact that Flock isn’t actively trying to capture more of your attention, a dramatic shift from the paradigm of most apps developed today, is not our focus…but it is certainly interesting.

On the other hand, the fact that from now on you don’t have to take multiple pictures with different cameras in order to be sure everyone gets a copy is incredible and relevant for this blog. One of the biggest frustrations about taking group photos has always been figuring out how to make sure everyone who wants a copy of the photo gets it. Either you can stick one person taking multiple photos with different devices, or you can upload the photo onto one of multiple photo-sharing sites and invite everyone to view the album— neither are very convenient.

With Flock, every time you take a photograph using a smart phone that is connected to a Facebook account, it uses the social media site’s face recognition software to identify the subjects of the photo. Immediately after taking the photo, it prompts you to allow it to notify them about the photo and invite them to access the photos in the album. They can choose to view photos, or download them for other uses. The biggest advantage about Flock is that it doesn’t require any extra work for anyone.

Flock is the next step in the natural progression of strategies leveraging the power of mobile devices. It’s also a big deal for people who want to share and use digital photos in the most convenient way possible. Whether you use your phone to supplement digital scanning or take the best shots of you and your friends, Flock makes it easier for you to share them.

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Facebook Photo Archive Will Get “Smarter” with Photos and Digital Scanning

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

There are roughly 3.5 trillion photos in existence in the world. Facebook boasted a repository of more than 140 billion photos at the start of 2012. This includes digital photos, which make up the majority obviously, and those uploaded with digital scanning. People currently take about 380 billion photos a year, slightly less than 50% of them captured with camera phones. Facebook anticipates that it will have had 70 billion new photos uploaded over the course of 2012, or roughly 18% of all photos captured in the same year.

This is by far the largest collection of photos on the planet and is estimated to contain fully 4% of all photos ever taken. And it means a number of things for how photography and technology will develop in the near future. And as having gone public puts increasing pressure on the social network to invent new monetary streams, it’s a fair bet they will look to get value from this huge and expensive archive.



With nearly 500 billion photos, Facebook will have enough information to help scientists develop incredibly accurate facial recognition software. They’re already working on decreasing the amount of false positives with their automatic tagging tools, and users are inadvertently helping them refine algorithms. We can all imagine what could happen if a publically accessible repository of photos became available or if Facebook were able to sell this tool to marketing firms and other companies, creating a world where cameras mounted throughout public spaces could recognize us instantly.

Beyond obvious uses of digital photos, the way it collects these photos and data about them will offer Facebook a lot more information. As opposed to using digital scanning to share an old photo, digital shots that we often capture using smart phones and upload through a mobile connection we often tell Facebook exactly where we are using GPS and geotagging. It leads to relatively mundane things like the potential for Facebook to construct places or even your experience based on photos you upload, as well as to glean information about users that would be incredibly valuable to marketers based on where you go and what you like to do.



Furthermore, a few professionals at the company consider Facebook “the world’s most powerful instrument for studying human society.” This mainly refers to the aggregate of the information it collects, not just photos. But the constant upload of new photos becomes even more powerful in light of all this information. Algorithms that analyze basic info in the photos along with the information people associate with them and the photographer or uploader could learn a great deal about trends in our tastes and activities, be it for commercial or scholastic purposes. For example, if software were developed to compare the physical characteristics of a person in a photo such as pallor and posture, against other, older photos of the same person, it could identify emerging illness. Combined with information about the person’s location and activity, this could hypothetically be used to pinpoint the “patient zero” in disease outbreaks.

Obviously, the power of the Facebook photo collection will increase as people upload more photos, more frequently, and closer to the time the photograph is captured. Similarly, the tools to analyze them, all this “big data” as it is called, are just slowly being imagined, let alone designed and tested. But the message is clear. For better or worse, Facebook is learning ever more about its users, through digital scanning of old photos, digital photo uploads, and the information we share, and it’s only a matter of time before it can crystallize the photos you upload into clear information about you and your surroundings.

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Mobile Digital Photography

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

Starting August 18th, the LA Mobile Arts Festival showed the professional side of what camera-phones can do. Run by the founders of iPhoneArt.com, this week-long gallery in Santa Monica featured 160 iPhone and iPad artists presenting a range of digital photography and other digital art including digital paintings. This is the biggest mobile photographer art show to date, ever. The focus was very specific, so other digital arts like photo scanning and even photos on other mobile brands were absent. And by the time the exhibit closed on the 25th, it had earned some hearty appreciation.



Fully one-third of the iPhone artists are professionals, and the rest have more to offer than the much-maligned Instagram food photo. Co-founder Daria Polichett said when “people think iPhone art or something iPhoneography they think of Instagram now… this is just a chance to show people that there’s a lot more really creative work going on and much more than they might expect that’s possible to do with these devices. ”

In other words, your iPhone and iPad are good for some incredible photos and pieces of art. Much of the art did involve the heavy processing and layers that mobile photographers tend to be quite fond of. So the framed prints ranged from crazy color-saturation to nearly complete abstraction. Whether the original subject was a flower, a person, or a building, the multitude of apps and processes produced some visually stunning objects, which the gallery curators had printed on a range of medium from bamboo panels and mirrors, to cars and a bay window.

According to many of the budding artists proud of their digital photography at the showing, the ability to point their device at anything and snap away, then filter the shots as necessary was profoundly liberating. It was this freedom and the ability to learn on the fly, with minimal financial or extra time investment, that got them into the art form and inspired the passion that ultimately led to the shots featured in the gallery.

Even pros have enjoyed the freedom of shedding pounds of photographic equipment with minimal sacrifice. Artists features at the Mobile Arts Festival who had been shooting professional photos for years described the ability to take 100 or 200 shots a day without carrying any extra equipment around. It allowed them to turn their entire life into a photo shoot.

The art show is the founders’ direct response to the mobile digital photography phenomenon. They wanted to give these “iPhonographers” a space to display their amazing art, and to give patrons a chance to observe a concentration of this quality that may be difficult to find online, amid the less-refined shots people love to share on sites like Facebook.

And while the LA Mobile Photography Arts Festival may be one of the first signs that iPhone cameras are gaining wider traction, the movement shows no signs of slowing. When everyone has access to digital photography on their phones and tablets at all times, an outpouring of high quality amateur photography makes perfect sense. And with this festival, it has a platform to be presented to the public.

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iPhoneography

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

There is a single camera that has started to gain a huge, cult-like following, has every feature imaginable, is highly portable and is a functioning cellular phone: the iPhone. Everyone is aware that the newer iPhones come equipped with well-made digital cameras, but many are not aware of what these little devices are truly capable of. iPhones are rapidly replacing every other camera on the market because of their versatility, size and the multitude of add-on applications available, making the photographic possibilities, practically, endless.  Many photographers, even professional-level ones, are abandoning their beloved DSLRs and 35mm film cameras in lieu of the iPhone. The initial gripes about using an iPhone for anything other than quick snaps came from its inabilities to manually adjust, its overly compact physical feel and its limiting lens capabilities. Well, with the advent of a huge number of applications and physical add-ons, all these gripes have been nipped in the butt.

There has recently been an arms race in the field of iPhoneography for mock camera bodies that attach to your iPhone and turn them into full-on, highly functioning digital cameras. These cases allow you to easily slip your iPhone inside to allow your mobile device to achieve photographic capabilities such as: utilizing different lenses, mounting on a tripod, and increased stability. There are a plethora of defunct attempts to make these camera body cases, but there are a few worth investing in. One of the leading photo add-ons for the iPhone is The Phocus, which is a case that fully encompasses your iPhone and gives it the look and feel of a digital camera with interchangeable lenses (including a wide-angle and fisheye). There are also more simplistic add-ons such as afisheye lens that attaches itself to your iPhone with magnets and a mini LED flash that attaches to the bottom of your phone called the iFlash.


The Phocus.Image: techcinema.com

The real draw of the iPhone derives from the huge amount of applications available that allow for quick, easy, and effective photo processing. Many professional level photographers have latched onto a handful of these apps and use them on a daily basis. One of the best features of these apps is that they are usually no more than $1.99 or, in some cases, completely free. Here is a breakdown of the two most highly recommended apps:

1) Camera +
$1.99

Camera+ has helped to pave the way for iPhoneography and has helped it to be considered a tangible and respected way to take photographs. With the installation of this application, you can perform many of the manual settings that high-performance digital cameras offer such as: setting the exposure independent of the focus and useimage stabilization. The real draw to this app lies within its photo-editing capabilities.  The Clarity filter is among one of the most beloved for iPhonecamera users and allows people to transform their shots into professional-looking photographs. You may easily adjust the intensity of the photo-processing as well, which makes Camera+ a must-have for true iPhoneography enthusiasts.

Camera+Image: iphoneography.com

2) Hipstamatic
$1.99

This application was part of the reason iPhone photos become so popular, trendy, and retro-looking. The Hipstamatic application gives your iPhone the feel of an old-school, analog camera while giving you the ability to switch lenses, types of “film,” and different flashes that give your photographs that highly sought after “polaroid-like” look. To add authenticity, your photos take a few seconds to “develop.”

In addition to these two apps, there are multitudes of other photo-editing and sharing applications to choose from that enhance your photographs and the iPhone photo experience. Some applications tend to play into a certain niche and perform alternative functions than merely editing and enhancing photographs. A few examples of task-specific apps include: The Landscape Sweeper which allows you to take a panoramic photograph by merely sweeping your camera left-to-right, The Framer which allows you to combine multiplephotos into a professional-looking timeframes, and Instagram which is a photo-sharing social site, which also allows you to apply filters to your photos in order to add a desired effect.

Instagram Screenshot.Image: iTunes

Well-known, professional photographers such as Sion Fullana, Dominque Jost and Dan Berman, have started working almost exclusively with the iPhone and have primarily been sharing their photographs online, as opposed to a gallery setting, on social media sites such as Flickr. The speed and efficiency of the photograph processing on the iPhone is unparalleled and a huge reason that so many are gravitating towards using the iPhone as their primary camera. So, think what you will about iPhoneography, but although it may appear to be a bit gimmicky it is quickly becoming the dominant format for practicing photographers.

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